Learning Free-Form Deformation for 3D Face Reconstruction from In-The-Wild Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel learning-based approach using Free-Form Deformation (FFD) for 3D face reconstruction from in-the-wild images, overcoming 3D Morphable Model limitations and enabling more accurate, interpretable, and user-friendly 3D face modeling.

Contribution

The paper proposes the first use of FFD in a learning framework for 3D face reconstruction, enhancing representation power and interpretability over traditional 3D Morphable Models.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods.

Successfully estimates 3D face geometry and expressions from 2D images.

Enables user fine-tuning with common 3D software tools.

Abstract

The 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which is a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based statistical model that represents a 3D face using linear basis functions, has shown promising results for reconstructing 3D faces from single-view in-the-wild images. However, 3DMM has restricted representation power due to the limited number of 3D scans and the global linear basis. To address the limitations of 3DMM, we propose a straightforward learning-based method that reconstructs a 3D face mesh through Free-Form Deformation (FFD) for the first time. FFD is a geometric modeling method that embeds a reference mesh within a parallelepiped grid and deforms the mesh by moving the sparse control points of the grid. As FFD is based on mathematically defined basis functions, it has no limitation in representation power. Thus, we can recover accurate 3D face meshes by estimating appropriate deviation of control points as deformation parameters. Although both 3DMM and FFD are parametric models, it is difficult to predict the effect of the 3DMM parameters on the face shape, while the deformation parameters of FFD are interpretable in terms of their effect on the final shape of the mesh. This practical advantage of FFD allows the resulting mesh and control points to serve as a good starting point for 3D face modeling, in that ordinary users can fine-tune the mesh by using widely available 3D software tools. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate how our method successfully estimates the 3D face geometry and facial expressions from 2D face images, achieving comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods.